Same issue in Quebec (Canada). I didn't have a choice in my home. Either I let them install the e-meter, or I would have to pay Hydro Quebec $200/yr to keep my old, functioning very nicely for 15 years, mechanical meter.
I check my bill every month to see if there's some differences from the previous month or same period the year earlier, but so far, knock on wood, nothing amiss so far.
I am, however, ticked at the craziness of it all. These eMeters are more expensive per unit that the sound mechanical ones, they haven't been around long enough to give anyone a good idea of mean time to failure (MTTF). I've worked with embedded (now called IoT) devices for 20+ years, and no electronic device I've ever heard of has even 1/2 the MMTF of it mechanical device it's supposed to replace.
Not only that, but it contributes to additional wireless radiation and congestion on the wireless frequencies it uses to bunny hop to the closest meter or concentration point.
I can ramble on, but this is just another reason to hate these things.
Another dumb statement in the article: "Succh a cryptanalysis would allow an attacker to counterfeit the authority of a system administrator, according to Fujitsu."
If I had known you could counterfeit authority, I would be sitting behind a really big desk with the flag of my own country behind it...
All this rigamarole makes me want to indulge my Luddite tendencies, dump all my credit cards and automatic withdrawls, deposits, bitcoins, and any other virtual currencies, convert it all to cash or better yet, gold coins, and move to the middle of nowhere. When I need something, I'll drive my beatup old clunker to the nearest town and buy everything I need with cold, hard, currency...
As others have said, the headline is misleading, and so is the story. However, everyone seems to be missing the point that a 'corporation' doesn't actually do anything. It's the people who are in charge of the corporation that do the things that are liked, disliked or reviled. If we can get governments and the public to remember this, I think a lot of improvements could be made.
LUXURY!!! Where I used to work (another Very Large International Conglomerate), we had a 5 MB limit, yeah, 5 MB, and that was in 2009-2010. And I had to WALK up the stairs to the 3rd floor. And it was 30 below with the AC blasting over my desk...
I know what you mean. I did a gig with a North American electricity supplier, and spent a lot of time in their Ops Center. They had 2 big screens at the front of the room, and about 8 workareas (semi-cicular desks) with 3 monitors on each of them, all the desks facing these massive 2 projection screens. One screen had real-time traffic and weather camera feeds going (why? I don't know, guess they wanted to know how the commute home would go...) The other screen had statuses for some of the more critical servers. Which was also funny, since I was there when one of those servers went from "green" to "red", and 4 pagers/phones went off in the room at the same time, and the those whose phones rang immediately got on the phone and started to troubleshoot, with the big screens all but forgotten.
In short, it's all for show, not really, truly useful...
Yeah, it's genius for the electricity generating companies, they can get the car owner to pay for the fuel to generate the electricity to charge their car.
Quebec is suffering the same issues. Canada established the Canada Health Infoway (https://www.infoway-inforoute.ca/lang-en/about-infoway) in 2001, has spent more than a $1B (CDN) to date, and just earmarked another $500M in 2010. None of this includes the $600M+ that Quebec has spent (let alone what the other provinces have spent) on Electronic Health Record systems...
The Canada Health Infoway is simply a framework and each province is responsible for setting up its own EHR system to link into it (health care is a provincial jurisdiction in Canada) . Overall, it's been a huge moneypit for Canadian taxpayers in most provinces (http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/story/2009/05/27/f-electronic-health-records.html).
All I can say is good luck to the UK in their quest for EHR...
SpeedyDX has is right, it is a complex issue. I would like to add that it shouldn't be this complicated. If we started to think of internet connectivity in terms of a utility model, like electricity, water or natural gas, that should be the way to do it; in other words, I want to pay for what I use, and I don't want to subsidize someone who uses more than I do, nor do I want to leech off of someone who uses less. I pay a one time fee to connect my house/apt to electricity, to gas, to water, and then I pay per kWh, m3 or whatever. I should be able to do the same for internet, let me pay x cents/Mb be done with all this crap.
Yes, this is an ideal, and yes, I don't think this will come to pass in my lifetime, but hey, one can wish.
Um, have you ever worked for a major corporation? I've worked on and seen the (multiple) data centers for Fortune 500 sized companies from banks, airlines, retail, government, and others. The sheer amount of legacy systems, multiple use systems, heterogeneous realities, political and financial realities... All of these necessitate a 'data center'.
Yes, what was called a 'data center' 20 years ago is certainly not what it is today, nor what it will be in 20 more years, but there will always be a need to centralize a certain percentage of computing resources.
Cloud computing is over-hyped, and for various security, political and financial reasons doesn't fit every business model.
So Amazon says: We'll host the raw data for your study! I say: who vouches for the validity of the data set itself? I understand that some of the sets are already publicly available, but that doesn't mean all. Will Amazon provide information on who/where the datasets came from? If I can't trust my data set, then I can't trust my results...
All we have in our bedroom is an analog clock on the wall that has a barely audible tick-tock. A nice king-sized bed with down duvet and a door that closes and furniture to hold our clothes and posessions. No TV, no phone, no cellphone, no PC, no radio, nada in terms of electronic devices.
All we do in the bedroom is talk, read, get dressed/undressed, have sex, and sleep. What a wonderful place to be at the beginning and at the end of the day.
IBM made this announcement internally (I'm an IBM employee) almost a week ago. IBM, like most companies, only makes these kinds of announcements when things are very well on their way, and the purchase price and other large profile details have already been worked out; usually it's just pending some the working out of certain legal details. M$ rumors or anything else will not change that.
My parents have a Kenwood receiver/amplifier that is about 30 years old and is still working great (even after I blew the power supply doing some stupid things 12-year-old boys do). I've got a pair of KEV C-10 speakers that I bought in 1985 as a graduation present for myself, and they still sound wonderful. That said, I am now on my 4th Palm Pilot in four years. My first IIIx's screen died after 9 months of regular use, my second IIIx suffered from intermittent, random power resets after 1-1/2 years and was replaced under warrantee with an m-100. The m-100 suffered again from random, intermittent power resets and died last month after only 1 year, and has now been replaced by a Palm Zire (m-150). I have very little confidence that it will last much longer than a year. I'm not brutal with these things, I use them normally and have had a padded carrying case for them from the start. When it dies, I'm going back to a paper agenda in a nice leather carying case.
My wife has a old Sony Walkman (one of the orginals) which still works fine (she jogs 2-3 times a week with it), but her Sony Diskman she bought 3 years ago now skips unless held perfectly still and the sound has degraded considerably. All this to say is that I truly believe that overall quality of consumer electronics has definitely deteriorated in the past 15 years.
I highly agree with this assessment. First of all, we don't have the original study to reference, so everything we say on this topic is pure speculation. The second comes from actual TCO studies themselves. I've done a few for my Big Blue employer, and each and every one is specific to the client . The TCO for client A has absolutely no relation to client B's TCO study except for the methodology used to arrive at the final numbers. Each situation is different, each environment is unique in number, type and use of servers. In short, I don't hold any stock in 'generalized' TCO studies.
"In this sense, the OS and filesystem are irrelevant, just like the OS is irrelevant to (pure) Java programs, and just like the filesystem is irrelevant in most email programs (Evolution, Kmail, Outlook). Of course, the data is stored in files within directories on a disk managed by an OS, but given that there is a completely different method of accessing that data, who cares?"
Um, not 'irrelevant', the OS is 'transparent' in this case. The email program or the Java program still require access to the underlying HW (data storage, display, etc) and therefore require an OS.
After reading the NYT article, I feel like having a good, loud BURP from the Pepsi-like nutritional value this guy's ideas are worth. What a load of pie-in-the-sky thinking. OK, yes, it would be very nice to work with one interface that allows me to store and retrieve all the assorted bits and bytes of my life. But no matter what that eventual piece of hardware looks like, it's still going to require some sort of OS to manage how it connects, how the HMI (Human Machine Interface) communicates with the entire information infrastructure behind it. I've worked in IT for 10 years now, and this guy is as close to the "Useless White Guy" I see playing CEO's and CTOs on HP, IBM, Sun and M$oft commercials everyday. For a compsci guy, this guy is clueless about the infrastructure and hardware and how to get it to work properly to make his 'ideas' work in the real world. I guess my 'realist' side is crying out to be heard today.
Quebec wants to separate from Canada, Alberta too, and in the USA, it's North Dakota and the Freedom State. I'm actually surprised that Canada and the USA have lasted this long as countries...
Hey Clonan (or is that Cluelessnan???) and others of your ilk,
Universities are supposed to be "learning institutions". A most crucial aspect of learning is learning how to learn. What does that mean? It means first learning how to formulate the problem in question into understandable terms. Then once the problem is understood, formulating how you'll go about solving it. How do you do that? By ASKING QUESTIONS!!! Sitting in a class with your pen glued to your pad furiously writing everything the prof says teaches you how to be a good stenographer, but teaches you nothing on how to learn.
The essence of learning and being able to continually learn throughout life is being able to ask questions, both rhetorically as well as of others, like "Hey, John, have you ever heard of this problem? What kind of approach was used to solve this before? What are the most effective approaches?" When this particular GA Tech freshman couldn't talk to his prof or his TA, he did the next best thing, he discussed it with someone else. The best minds in the world work better through collaboration, not isolated in their dorm rooms reading books from a limited list sanctioned by The University (remember Orwell's 1984? Reading anything but Sanctioned Material is double plus ungood!).
I've been a practicing engineer as well as an IT consultant for over a decade, and the major thing I've learned is that there is no possible way in the universe for anyone to KNOW all that they need to get the job done. Especially in this age of hyperspeed information change, the three best skills that anyone can have are: 1) The ability to learn on the fly 2) The ability to network (i.e. COMMUNICATE) with others 3) The ability to take what information you need and apply it to solve the problem at hand and discard the rest, and hopefully remember how you did this in case the problem comes up again in the future.
None of this is accomplished in a vacuum of self. Oppenheimer worked with Einstein and a team of several dozen engineers and technologist to build the bomb, he didn't do it alone; Linux was developed by Linus Thorvald acting as the leader of a worldwide team of professional and amateur programmers working and collaborating together.
GA Tech's CompSci methods are outdated and oldschool. The method is good for producing jar heads who can follow orders, not people who will be able to collaborate and innovate.
Microsoft clustering is basically for load balancing. For Win2K Server, you're limited to 2 servers on a cluster, ofr Win2K Advanced Server, it's 4 servers per cluster, and I don't know what the limit is for Datacenter. In any case, you'll need Win2K licenses for each server in the cluster.
In addition, each server in a Microsoft cluster can be active or passive. Active means it shares in the load (depending on how you configure the distribution of tasks), while passive mode means the server sits there waiting for the active node to fail.
So a M$ cluster is not meant for massive parallel processing operations.
As for Beowolf clusters, I was always under the impression that these were specifically designed for highly scaleable parallel processing (although I've never actually seen or played with a Beowolf cluster).
Slashdot Mirror
Same issue in Quebec (Canada). I didn't have a choice in my home. Either I let them install the e-meter, or I would have to pay Hydro Quebec $200/yr to keep my old, functioning very nicely for 15 years, mechanical meter.
I check my bill every month to see if there's some differences from the previous month or same period the year earlier, but so far, knock on wood, nothing amiss so far.
I am, however, ticked at the craziness of it all. These eMeters are more expensive per unit that the sound mechanical ones, they haven't been around long enough to give anyone a good idea of mean time to failure (MTTF). I've worked with embedded (now called IoT) devices for 20+ years, and no electronic device I've ever heard of has even 1/2 the MMTF of it mechanical device it's supposed to replace.
Not only that, but it contributes to additional wireless radiation and congestion on the wireless frequencies it uses to bunny hop to the closest meter or concentration point.
I can ramble on, but this is just another reason to hate these things.
Another dumb statement in the article:
"Succh a cryptanalysis would allow an attacker to counterfeit the authority of a system administrator, according to Fujitsu."
If I had known you could counterfeit authority, I would be sitting behind a really big desk with the flag of my own country behind it...
All this rigamarole makes me want to indulge my Luddite tendencies, dump all my credit cards and automatic withdrawls, deposits, bitcoins, and any other virtual currencies, convert it all to cash or better yet, gold coins, and move to the middle of nowhere. When I need something, I'll drive my beatup old clunker to the nearest town and buy everything I need with cold, hard, currency...
There's also OmniGraffle...
http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnigraffle/
When you do this, post your website, I'm sure we can get it slashdotted in no time :-)
As others have said, the headline is misleading, and so is the story. However, everyone seems to be missing the point that a 'corporation' doesn't actually do anything. It's the people who are in charge of the corporation that do the things that are liked, disliked or reviled. If we can get governments and the public to remember this, I think a lot of improvements could be made.
LUXURY!!! Where I used to work (another Very Large International Conglomerate), we had a 5 MB limit, yeah, 5 MB, and that was in 2009-2010. And I had to WALK up the stairs to the 3rd floor. And it was 30 below with the AC blasting over my desk...
I know what you mean. I did a gig with a North American electricity supplier, and spent a lot of time in their Ops Center. They had 2 big screens at the front of the room, and about 8 workareas (semi-cicular desks) with 3 monitors on each of them, all the desks facing these massive 2 projection screens. One screen had real-time traffic and weather camera feeds going (why? I don't know, guess they wanted to know how the commute home would go...) The other screen had statuses for some of the more critical servers. Which was also funny, since I was there when one of those servers went from "green" to "red", and 4 pagers/phones went off in the room at the same time, and the those whose phones rang immediately got on the phone and started to troubleshoot, with the big screens all but forgotten.
In short, it's all for show, not really, truly useful...
Yeah, it's genius for the electricity generating companies, they can get the car owner to pay for the fuel to generate the electricity to charge their car.
Quebec is suffering the same issues. Canada established the Canada Health Infoway (https://www.infoway-inforoute.ca/lang-en/about-infoway) in 2001, has spent more than a $1B (CDN) to date, and just earmarked another $500M in 2010. None of this includes the $600M+ that Quebec has spent (let alone what the other provinces have spent) on Electronic Health Record systems...
The Canada Health Infoway is simply a framework and each province is responsible for setting up its own EHR system to link into it (health care is a provincial jurisdiction in Canada) . Overall, it's been a huge moneypit for Canadian taxpayers in most provinces (http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/story/2009/05/27/f-electronic-health-records.html).
All I can say is good luck to the UK in their quest for EHR...
SpeedyDX has is right, it is a complex issue. I would like to add that it shouldn't be this complicated. If we started to think of internet connectivity in terms of a utility model, like electricity, water or natural gas, that should be the way to do it; in other words, I want to pay for what I use, and I don't want to subsidize someone who uses more than I do, nor do I want to leech off of someone who uses less. I pay a one time fee to connect my house/apt to electricity, to gas, to water, and then I pay per kWh, m3 or whatever. I should be able to do the same for internet, let me pay x cents/Mb be done with all this crap.
Yes, this is an ideal, and yes, I don't think this will come to pass in my lifetime, but hey, one can wish.
All we need, more totally useless shit passed off as art going to fill up already overburdened landfills.
What a legacy to leave our kids :-(
Um, have you ever worked for a major corporation? I've worked on and seen the (multiple) data centers for Fortune 500 sized companies from banks, airlines, retail, government, and others. The sheer amount of legacy systems, multiple use systems, heterogeneous realities, political and financial realities... All of these necessitate a 'data center'.
Yes, what was called a 'data center' 20 years ago is certainly not what it is today, nor what it will be in 20 more years, but there will always be a need to centralize a certain percentage of computing resources.
Cloud computing is over-hyped, and for various security, political and financial reasons doesn't fit every business model.
So Amazon says: We'll host the raw data for your study! I say: who vouches for the validity of the data set itself? I understand that some of the sets are already publicly available, but that doesn't mean all. Will Amazon provide information on who/where the datasets came from? If I can't trust my data set, then I can't trust my results...
That the very fix to the vulnurability is the target of the worm's DOS attack...
All we do in the bedroom is talk, read, get dressed/undressed, have sex, and sleep. What a wonderful place to be at the beginning and at the end of the day.
IBM made this announcement internally (I'm an IBM employee) almost a week ago. IBM, like most companies, only makes these kinds of announcements when things are very well on their way, and the purchase price and other large profile details have already been worked out; usually it's just pending some the working out of certain legal details. M$ rumors or anything else will not change that.
My wife has a old Sony Walkman (one of the orginals) which still works fine (she jogs 2-3 times a week with it), but her Sony Diskman she bought 3 years ago now skips unless held perfectly still and the sound has degraded considerably. All this to say is that I truly believe that overall quality of consumer electronics has definitely deteriorated in the past 15 years.
I highly agree with this assessment. First of all, we don't have the original study to reference, so everything we say on this topic is pure speculation. The second comes from actual TCO studies themselves. I've done a few for my Big Blue employer, and each and every one is specific to the client . The TCO for client A has absolutely no relation to client B's TCO study except for the methodology used to arrive at the final numbers. Each situation is different, each environment is unique in number, type and use of servers. In short, I don't hold any stock in 'generalized' TCO studies.
As of 10:01am EST, the microsoft update website displayes the message "SERVICE UNAVAILABLE". Oh the irony of it all...
Um, not 'irrelevant', the OS is 'transparent' in this case. The email program or the Java program still require access to the underlying HW (data storage, display, etc) and therefore require an OS.
After reading the NYT article, I feel like having a good, loud BURP from the Pepsi-like nutritional value this guy's ideas are worth. What a load of pie-in-the-sky thinking. OK, yes, it would be very nice to work with one interface that allows me to store and retrieve all the assorted bits and bytes of my life. But no matter what that eventual piece of hardware looks like, it's still going to require some sort of OS to manage how it connects, how the HMI (Human Machine Interface) communicates with the entire information infrastructure behind it.
I've worked in IT for 10 years now, and this guy is as close to the "Useless White Guy" I see playing CEO's and CTOs on HP, IBM, Sun and M$oft commercials everyday. For a compsci guy, this guy is clueless about the infrastructure and hardware and how to get it to work properly to make his 'ideas' work in the real world.
I guess my 'realist' side is crying out to be heard today.
Quebec wants to separate from Canada, Alberta too, and in the USA, it's North Dakota and the Freedom State.
I'm actually surprised that Canada and the USA have lasted this long as countries...
Hey Clonan (or is that Cluelessnan???) and others of your ilk,
Universities are supposed to be "learning institutions". A most crucial aspect of learning is learning how to learn. What does that mean? It means first learning how to formulate the problem in question into understandable terms. Then once the problem is understood, formulating how you'll go about solving it. How do you do that? By ASKING QUESTIONS!!! Sitting in a class with your pen glued to your pad furiously writing everything the prof says teaches you how to be a good stenographer, but teaches you nothing on how to learn.
The essence of learning and being able to continually learn throughout life is being able to ask questions, both rhetorically as well as of others, like "Hey, John, have you ever heard of this problem? What kind of approach was used to solve this before? What are the most effective approaches?" When this particular GA Tech freshman couldn't talk to his prof or his TA, he did the next best thing, he discussed it with someone else. The best minds in the world work better through collaboration, not isolated in their dorm rooms reading books from a limited list sanctioned by The University (remember Orwell's 1984? Reading anything but Sanctioned Material is double plus ungood!).
I've been a practicing engineer as well as an IT consultant for over a decade, and the major thing I've learned is that there is no possible way in the universe for anyone to KNOW all that they need to get the job done. Especially in this age of hyperspeed information change, the three best skills that anyone can have are:
1) The ability to learn on the fly
2) The ability to network (i.e. COMMUNICATE) with others
3) The ability to take what information you need and apply it to solve the problem at hand and discard the rest, and hopefully remember how you did this in case the problem comes up again in the future.
None of this is accomplished in a vacuum of self. Oppenheimer worked with Einstein and a team of several dozen engineers and technologist to build the bomb, he didn't do it alone; Linux was developed by Linus Thorvald acting as the leader of a worldwide team of professional and amateur programmers working and collaborating together.
GA Tech's CompSci methods are outdated and oldschool. The method is good for producing jar heads who can follow orders, not people who will be able to collaborate and innovate.
In addition, each server in a Microsoft cluster can be active or passive. Active means it shares in the load (depending on how you configure the distribution of tasks), while passive mode means the server sits there waiting for the active node to fail.
So a M$ cluster is not meant for massive parallel processing operations.
As for Beowolf clusters, I was always under the impression that these were specifically designed for highly scaleable parallel processing (although I've never actually seen or played with a Beowolf cluster).